Exactly what i have in mind… a custom order, that can be displayed "as is". Most applicable to any product catalog, company services, team/staff pages etc.
I assume, your author has to use the regular article manager in backend, right? Or do you know a frontend solution? Or at least a way to ask the user on the form?
Unfortunately J25/3+ has no frontend feature to choose another article for position. New articles simply go to the top-most position… i guess, it gets a "zero" in ordering field. If you submit multiple articles, it seems to run a certain function that re-numbers all articles from 1 to "last".
The same happens in backend after dragNdrop. In Joomla 2.5 after clicking the save/disk icon.
There seems to be no developer docs about it.